


Ten Months Late

by timetravelbypen



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Episode: Revolution of the Daleks, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-12 05:55:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28505583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/timetravelbypen/pseuds/timetravelbypen
Summary: The Doctor needs the spare TARDIS to defeat the daleks. And as soon as she steps foot inside, she sees just how much she's been missed.
Relationships: Thirteen and the Fam, Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan & Graham O'Brien & Ryan Sinclair, Thirteenth Doctor/Yasmin Khan
Comments: 11
Kudos: 79





	Ten Months Late

The inside of the spare TARDIS crashes into the Doctor like a supernova.

She barely has any time – the daleks are coming, how are the daleks _always coming?_ – and yet the sight of it stops her in her tracks. Yaz races past her, the constellations of post-it notes in increasingly scrawled and frantic versions of Yaz’s neat handwriting of no importance to her anymore. But they’re all the Doctor can see.

“Just – er – grabbing my kit,” she says, scooping a few things into her arms. Cell phone with a dead battery. Half-zipped duffle. Sleeping bag. “You have what you need here?”

“What?” the Doctor says, then blinks, shaking herself. “Yeah, ‘course I do. Won’t be a minute. When the system’s primed the console screen on my TARDIS’ll start blinking orange. Tell me when it starts?”

“Got it,” Yaz replies, bounding with her belonging back into the familiar orange glow of the Doctor’s TARDIS.

Leaving the Doctor standing in the wreckage of ten months of grief.

She can see it immediately. A rainbow of post-it notes skim across the console, arrows pointing to different buttons and levers and dials with theories about what they might do. Newspaper clippings and printed-out articles going back fifteen Earth years join more post-its pinned up against the cold white circles on the walls. The circled notes, all the questions and theories, lead to her name. Yaz, brilliant, clever, kind Yaz, had been looking for her.

The Doctor had left her alone with no warning and Yaz had tried to come and look for her anyway.

Suddenly nineteen years of solitude feels like nothing, not when she had known that the fam was waiting on the other side and they had probably thought she was dead. Or worse, had forgotten them entirely.

The Doctor pushes herself forward even as her hearts break just a little bit more.

“Right,” she reminds herself, fingers attacking the console, jumping back as it sparked at her, once. Factory settings. She wasn’t used to that anymore. “No time for wallowing. Get a shift on.”

There was never any _time_ , was there? Or if there was, it was all in the wrong place, in the wrong order. Nineteen years locked in space jail, attempting escapes, waiting, always waiting. She had a time machine and yet somehow she was still always late, or always rushing off to the next emergency, or always stranded in exactly the wrong place.

She gently moved aside Yaz’s post-it notes – not that it would matter if their plan worked – and folded a few into her pocket to consult later. To remind her that she owed Yaz a Conversation. She hadn’t thought she was much for Conversations, but Ryan had just showed her that they weren’t all bad, hadn’t he?

He’d changed so much. They all had. Without her.

She’d left them thinking she would die for them – had been _glad_ to die for them – and now her miraculous return was still somehow far too late.

“The light’s blinking now, Doctor!” Yaz’s voice came through two sets of doors.

“Brilliant, be right there!” the Doctor replied.

She yanked one last lever into place, setting their plan in motion, and scurried back on board her own familiar ship, the one that glowed with warm gold light rather than sterile cold ones, the one that smelled like biscuits and engine oil and home.

“Oh, mate,” she whispered, patting the wooden blue door as she closed it behind her. Her ship burbled something soft and low, something that sounded like an apology.

“You ready?” Yaz said, raising an eyebrow at her across the console.

The Doctor pulled a smile across her face and bounded up the ramp to the console.

“Always ready, me,” she said as brightly as she could.

She owed Yaz a Conversation. And as much as she wished it could be now, as much as she wished her ship had a break mechanism that would freeze the world around them for just five minutes so she could rip the plaster off, so they could both clear the air, they had work to do.

It was time to be the Doctor again.

Stop the daleks.

Save the planet.

…keep the fam together.

**Author's Note:**

> I loved yesterday's special, what did you all think? An excellent balance of Big Emotions and some dalek stuff to string the plot along admirably. Perfect sendoffs for Ryan and Graham (although I hope they guest-star in some episodes down the road like Martha did). 
> 
> As soon as I saw all those daleks in the spare TARDIS surrounded by Yaz's post-it notes, I knew that meant that the Doctor had also seen those notes and wanted to know what she thought... so I wrote this at midnight after the episode because of course I did. Short and sweet, hope you enjoy!


End file.
